So, a Funny Thing Happened Once the Health Care Website Started Working…

Remember a few weeks back when all Republicans wanted to talk about was the issues plaguing the Affordable Care Act website, HealthCare.gov?

You couldn’t turn on a right-wing media outlet — or any conservative media source for that matter — without being blasted endlessly by what amounted to some giddy school kid who was almost peeing their pants in excitement because something they really wanted to happen was happening.

“Obamacare” was having issues.

And I’ll be the first one to tell you, the issues with HealthCare.gov were absolutely embarrassing. For the first time, I was embarrassed of President Obama. I just couldn’t wrap my head around how these issues were happening. And even though President Obama wasn’t personally involved in much to do with creating the website, as president (and it being his signature law), he was still the one who deserved almost all of the blame. I believe he’s a brilliant man — though flawed like most politicians — but I just couldn’t figure out how so much incompetence was put forth behind the scenes leading up to the official launch of HealthCare.gov.

But man, Republicans were falling over themselves to bash the website. Many proclaiming the websites failures undoubtedly proved what a failure the healthcare law was.

Well, a funny thing happened — the website got fixed.

Now don’t get me wrong, the website still has a few bugs. But for the most part, it’s working well for most Americans. Though I’m sure to conservatives they’ll focus on the couple of issues the website is still experiencing instead of the vast majority of the success stories we’re seeing come out now.

However, since the website has started to work for the vast majority of Americans using it, suddenly Republicans don’t seem to care much about discussing it. Sure, it was easy for them to bash it when the website was experiencing inexcusable issues, but once it was fixed they wanted no part of it.

When the first numbers were released, which were horrifically low, conservatives couldn’t wait to champion the “Obamacare failure,” as many put it.

Then when November’s numbers came in showing that signups for “Obamacare” through the federal website went from 26,794 in October to 137,204 — Republicans didn’t want to talk about that either.

Oh, just for the record, state exchange signups skyrocketed to from 79,391 to 227,478. Something else Republicans didn’t want to talk about.

Well, that’s not entirely true. They’ll bring up how signups are way behind initial projections — and they’re right. But what’s important isn’t a set of numbers that was more or less a guess based on a “hunch,” it’s the fact that the number of Americans signing up for health care is drastically increasing. Numbers that will only continue to skyrocket once December’s totals are released.

But I’m willing to bet that at the end of December, that’s something else Republicans won’t want to talk about either.

Allen Clifton is a native Texan who now lives in the Austin area. He has a degree in Political Science from Sam Houston State University. Allen is a co-founder of Forward Progressives and creator of the popular Right Off A Cliff column and Facebook page. Be sure to follow Allen on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe to his channel on YouTube as well.